According to a recent government survey, young people in Japan spend an average of nearly five hours a day online during weekdays, and around 65% of 10-year-olds already have their own smartphone.
According to a 2023 survey by the Children and Families Agency, the most common reason for young people to use the Internet was to watch videos, with music, games, and search engines also ranking high.
High school students spend 6 hours and 14 minutes using the internet per weekday, an increase of 29 minutes from the 2022 survey.
A document photo taken in September 2018 shows middle school students using smartphones. (Joint)
Junior high school students spent 4 hours and 42 minutes using the service, an increase of 5 minutes from the previous year, and elementary school students aged 10 and older increased their usage time from 12 minutes to 3 hours and 46 minutes.
More than half of seven-year-olds use the internet for learning, and the government's initiative to provide one computer or tablet per student may be influencing this figure.
The smartphone ownership rate was 21.3% for 7-year-olds, 65.2% for 10-year-olds, 91.9% for 13-year-olds, and 99.1% for 16-year-olds.
However, 83.4% of parents with children over the age of 10 said they had set restrictions on smartphone use, with parental controls that block access to inappropriate sites being the most common at 44.2%. This is a safety measure.
Other measures taken by parents of children up to the age of 9 were 61.9% to always use devices in the presence of an adult, and 58.1% to set limits on when and where devices can be used.
The survey was conducted from November to December last year and received responses from 2,160 randomly selected parents of children aged 0 to 9, as well as 3,279 students aged 10 to 17 and 3,322 of their parents. .
